Gravity will restore your faith in cinema

Alfonso Cuaron's space thriller is a masterpiece of modern special effects. Float into it.

One question crosses your mind again and again as you're watching Gravity: how did Alfonso Cuaron ever get this made? Not just the mind-blowing visual achievements, which innovate and take film beyond its current boundaries. It's more than that. For one, in a current climate, where even the worst summer schlock lasts for three hours, it's only 91 minutes long. It contains only two actors – for much of it, only one. It has hardly any dialogue, and a remarkably simple plot. It is, in short, unlike anything you've ever seen.

The plot is as follows: Sandra Bullock and George Clooney play astronauts sent to repair the Hubble telescope. When the Hubble and their shuttle are struck by the debris of an exploded satellite, they have to find a way back to earth. That's it.

The simplicity of the plot and dialogue allows you to focus on the real joy of Gravity: sheer spectacle. In an astonishing 13 minute single shot opening sequence, Cuaron introduces us to space as you've never seen it. The earth, enormous and glowing, rotates beneath you. Bullock and Clooney above it in zero gravity; sunlight glints off the glass of their visors. You will tilt your head as they drift and spin in front of you, you will flinch as debris hurtles towards the camera, you will marvel mouth-open at the beauty of space as Cuaron and his visual FX team have created it. (It's beautiful but also remarkably realistic: Buzz Aldrin's only critique was that the earth's surface is too detailed). But most of all, you will sit and think "how is this possible?"

If Ang Lee's sumptuous Life Of Pi demonstrated the sheer power of modern special effects, Gravity takes that to another dimension. For enormous portions of the film the only real thing you're seeing on the screen is Sandra Bullock's face. (Bullock's performance, as usual, is excellent – don't be surprised if she gets an Oscar nomination. Cuaron's is inevitable.) The sheer depth of space and the effect of zero gravity is also the ultimate playground for 3D; Cuaron, knowing this, often shoots in the first person to make the spectacle even more intense. This is cinema at its core: a visceral, visual experience.

It speaks volumes for Cuaron's gift as a director that even as Gravity hurtles along like an Apollo rocket, he still finds time for the philosophical. In one moment, Bullock drifts into a spaceship, sucking up air, drifting like a baby in an oxygen-giving womb. The message is simple: what in the universe compels us to venture into such a deadly, lonely void? (This film will not do much for Virgin Galactic's sales.) Perhaps, despite the effects, that is Gravity's greatest achievement: by the time the credits roll, you'll never have felt so grateful to be standing on solid ground.